I love education. Not necessarily as a structured organism, but the foundational answer to curiosity.

Both of my parents were educators. My father taught for a few years at a private school and was also adjunct faculty at the local college. My mother taught for 38 years as a public school music teacher. Most of those years she was the entire music department for K-12 students at a small, underfunded school.

My parents both shared a philosophy — regularly cited by my mother: “Young minds are hungry for knowledge, and you should always feed a hungry mind.”

They taught me to feed my mind early. My mom taught me and my siblings to read at the age of 3. I loved everything about it. By the time I was in junior high, I was labeled an autodidact, which means I learn simply for the joy of learning.

All of that comes from one place: curiosity.

This country has spent decades treating the American public education system like a factory — inputs, outputs and a rigorous focus on the “right” answer. But if we want to raise a generation capable of navigating a world that changes every five minutes, we need to stop teaching kids what to think and start focusing on how to wonder.

Walt Whitman had it right when he famously advised us to “be curious, not judgmental.” In a classroom setting, judgment is the ultimate conversation killer. The second a student decides they “know” a subject — or worse, that a subject is “boring” or “useless” — the door to learning slams shut.

But this isn’t just a 19th-century poetic ideal; it’s a 2,500-year-old pedagogical strategy.

Long before the scientific method, the Buddha delivered a teaching known as the Kalama Sutta. He was approached by a group of people exhausted by conflicting “experts” all claiming to have the only truth. His response was radical: Don’t believe it just because I said it, or because it’s written down, or because it’s tradition.

He told them to test every idea against their own experience. In Buddhism, this isn’t just “being rebellious” — it’s a spiritual mandate for inquiry.

If we applied the Kalama Sutta to our public schools, the goal of a history or science class wouldn’t be to memorize a date or a formula for a Friday quiz. The goal would be to investigate reality.

When we pair Whitman’s emotional openness with the Buddha’s analytical rigor, education stops being a passive filling of the bucket. It becomes a muscle. To be not judgmental in a chemistry lab or a civics debate means suspending the urge to label an idea as settled before you’ve actually explored it.

I’m encouraged to see our school district employing administrators and faculty who approach their profession as a calling and not just a job. They seem to recognize they have a duty to teach, and that part of that duty is encouraging curiosity.

We don’t need more students who are good at being told what to believe. We need students who have the beginner’s mind to stay curious and the intellectual bravery to know for themselves.